Shayler's partner to publish MI5 book

Shayler's partner to publish MI5 book

Monday 27 October 2003 05.26 EST
First published on Monday 27 October 2003 05.26 EST

The partner of the former MI5 officer David Shayler is poised to publish her own damning account of her time in the security service.

But Annie Machon says that unlike Mr Shayler, she is taking steps to stop her book being vetoed from publication because of secrecy laws.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Ms Machon revealed that her book, Anarchy in the UK, will name a former trade unionist who was a Soviet agent and disclose previously unpublished details of a British intelligence officer who spied for the Warsaw pact.

She said her account would also explore the culture within the security service - "how when things go wrong they are skewed, and how they sometimes lie to the government to cover it up".

The move comes at a time when the intelligence service is trying to prevent the publication of further memoirs by former British spies.

Ms Machon's book will also reignite the anger felt among civil servants and intelligence officers over MI5's willingness to allow Dame Stella Rimington, it's former director general, to publish her own book.

Mr Shayler was jailed for six months for breaching the Official Secrets Act after he spoke out about his time in the service. But Ms Machon is submitting her book to Treasury solicitors next month - who will review its contents before publication - to stop the same thing happening to her.

She said: "This is what they always said during legal action against David: he had not taken the proper legal process. Well I am. We are going to be legal and above-board throughout."

She said her book would expand on some of Mr Shayler's original allegations, including alleged MI6 involvement in an assassination bid on the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gadafy, and the failure to prevent the Bishopsgate bombing in April 1993.

An injunction prevents Mr Shayler publishing anything about his time in MI5.

Mr Shayler said Ms Machon was doing the book because he could not, but Ms Machon, who lives with him on OseaIsland, Essex, said she was writing the book for herself as much as for him, because of the disillusionment she and others felt about the service.

"There was an esprit de corps among a whole generation of general intelligence officers who joined at the same time as us, and the year we left [1996] they were flooding out and that was as a result of that frustration," she said.